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Post by sportsman on Jul 10, 2019 18:47:47 GMT
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Post by loosestools on Jul 10, 2019 18:58:53 GMT
Toby Jones' dad - of Nello fame.
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Post by onefatcopper on Jul 10, 2019 19:17:12 GMT
A true Stoke fan who when possible attended home games or away games near to theatres that he would be appearing at, people now would probably associate Freddie with Emmerdale but Freddie was also a tremendous character actor in the movies, usually playing the villain in Movies like The Elephant Man. A truly sad loss for Stoke City as he was a tremendous ambassador for the club and also for the City, god bless you Freddie now go and have a beer with Gordon and the rest of the lads .
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Post by Clem Fandango on Jul 10, 2019 19:22:15 GMT
RIP Freddie. Didn't really know much of his work given Im probably a bit too young but Toby is a fantastic actor and he must have a hand in that so I salute him.
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Post by stokey spoon on Jul 10, 2019 19:38:41 GMT
RIP Freddie!
Firefox!! One of my favourite films as a kid! Loved that aeroplane/superjet!!
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Post by johnnypotter on Jul 10, 2019 19:52:11 GMT
Freddie loved Stoke City and used to to enjoy the early 70s when we kicked off at 3.15, just time for an extra beer before the match. Have seen him in many of his television roles. Have a beer with Waddo. R.I.P.
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Post by petershiltonsmini on Jul 10, 2019 20:11:07 GMT
Wasn't there a real hard case called Freddie Jones who used to work the doors?
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Post by crapslinger on Jul 10, 2019 20:24:57 GMT
RIP Freddie went to the same school as my late Dad, used to see him down at the Vic liked a drink did Freddie God bless him.
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Post by thevoid on Jul 10, 2019 20:26:19 GMT
Wasn't there a real hard case called Freddie Jones who used to work the doors? No that's Slogger. He took the doors off Freddie, it was a right bloodbath. |
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Post by s7oke on Jul 10, 2019 20:30:09 GMT
RIP Freddie
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Post by boothenender on Jul 10, 2019 20:57:08 GMT
RIP Freddie.
He was my mate's Uncle.
My mate is only 57 and Freddie looked younger than him.
Freddie was a Potter through and through.
His Stokie accent was trained out of him to allow him to talk a bit posher.
I read that he was a lab assistant, but he gave up the job because they where not allowed to grow a beard...
Proper old gentleman.
He will be missed by all people that knew him.
Sleep tight Freddie.
Our thoughts are with your family at this sad time.
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Post by maninasuitcase on Jul 10, 2019 20:59:03 GMT
RIP fellow neckender.
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Post by bloodtypered on Jul 11, 2019 8:22:02 GMT
He thought it was great, that stoke were the only team to start at 3.15, to give supporters chance to finsh their drink
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Post by neilb987 on Jul 11, 2019 10:04:22 GMT
RIP Freddie, Stokie through and through, and one of Dresden's finest exports ...
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Post by mondeoman on Jul 11, 2019 11:22:07 GMT
Seen him in many films, had a big role in the sci fi classic "Dune", great actor.
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Post by harrysburrow on Jul 11, 2019 12:10:31 GMT
Seen him in many films, had a big role in the sci fi classic "Dune", great actor. And Juggernaut + Elephant Man to name a couple more mate - top actor. RIP Freddie. |
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Post by future100 on Jul 11, 2019 12:19:56 GMT
Wasn't there a real hard case called Freddie Jones who used to work the doors? Yes, he was on Port Vale's books as a youngster, hard as nails, sadly died about 3/4 years ago. |
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Post by harrysburrow on Jul 11, 2019 12:47:21 GMT
Wasn't there a real hard case called Freddie Jones who used to work the doors? Yes, he was on Port Vale's books as a youngster, hard as nails, sadly died about 3/4 years ago. When I was a student, I worked a couple of summer breaks in the packing house at Diamond Clay with Fred and his brother Buster. Hard as nails is putting it mildly - he could also come to work clean shaven and have a full beard by home time! I look back on that time as a true character builder 😎 |
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Post by Northy on Jul 11, 2019 13:28:00 GMT
RIP, great actor, never knew he was a Stokie
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Post by Godo on Jul 11, 2019 19:31:24 GMT
Great actor...…...think his best role was as John Merrick's "owner" Bytes in The Elephant Man …………….he was also in other David Lynch films such as Dune and Wild at Heart. I used the work with a bloke about 35 years ago who was a friend of his. He said that even though Jones was at the RSC at the time that Freddie would always call into to see his old mates from the Longton area and would always more than stand his round in the local pubs. Sad loss. RIP.
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Post by greyman on Jul 12, 2019 9:50:11 GMT
His obituary from The Times
Acting school had changed almost everything about Freddie Jones, including his voice and posture, but he would not change his name. “I hung on to it: it’s an instant contact with my roots,” he said. “There are limits beyond which I will not go — every whore has his price.”
Jones was a character actor. Interviewers enjoyed describing his face. “A chin on the verge of wobbling, eyes that can’t help searching for the exit, a round pink face that threatens to blur into a howl, like a Lucian Freud painting,” wrote one. “A breadfruit in mourning,” declared another. “A dented doughnut,” wrote a third. His clothes were distinctive too: he favoured a large, black fedora, and could be seen striding purposefully about the sleepy Oxfordshire town of Charlbury, where he lived for 30 years, with a multi- coloured scarf and long cape flying out behind him. Then there was the voice; it had the texture of ancient woodwork.
He acted in more than 70 films and made many more appearances on stage and on television. Although he did not become a professional actor until the age of 28, he made up for it by working as a soap star until well into his eighties. Along the way he worked with Clint Eastwood, David Lynch and Federico Fellini. Coffee laced with whisky helped to cheer him through grey mornings.
He was a romantic. While filming the 1968 Granada television series The Caesars in Manchester, the cast would drink bottles of champagne into the small hours while Jones declaimed poetry, occasionally inserting his own and making his companions guess the poet. “I’d listen and say, ‘Oh, late Forties, early Fifties . . . a bit Dylan-ish, but not Dylan . . . someone not really very good . . . I know, it’s you!” recalled Philip Mackie, later head of Granada Films.
Jones’s introduction to acting was romantic too. Bored stiff by a job in ceramics, his life was changed by a girlfriend who would cycle out to see him where he lived — in a hut in the middle of an orchard — and who introduced him to a local drama course. One evening, after a lecture, the instructor asked him to wait behind. “I cannot understand why a man of your talents is in science,” she said. Stunned, he asked her to repeat herself “so I can carry the lines around with me in my heart”. He was so disturbed by her confidence in him that he lost all interest in his work and was eventually sacked. At a loss, he went home to his parents. However, drama school prospectuses started to arrive. The instructor had written to them on his behalf. He applied and was accepted.
Frederick Charles Jones was born in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in 1927, the son of Charles Jones, who worked as a jollier on ceramic insulators, and his wife, Ida, well-known locally as a pub pianist. “She played piano the way most people play rugby,” Jones said, “as though she had a grudge against it.” Freddie grew up under the sulphurous pall of kilns of the Potteries, remembering “air so thick that you could chew it at times”. Many neighbours got by on odd jobs attaching spouts to teapots — they often could not afford shoes for their children.
He received what he called “my first sense of the total magic of the theatre” at the Theatre Royal in nearby Hanley, which he visited with the scouts. “Maybe it was something to do with the terrific dramatic contrast between the vividly lit stage and the dark bowels of backstage.”
On leaving the grammar school in Longton, however, there was parental pressure to get a white-collar job “with a pension”. He did a year at commercial school, then left to become an assistant manager at Woolworths. He later became a clerk in a colliery office and after that spent ten years in a ceramic research laboratory in Tamworth specialising in urinals.
There he was in charge of five assistants: it was a good job, but one that made him miserable. His evenings were spent at working men’s clubs playing cribbage. A late starter romantically, he was 25 before he finally got a girlfriend, “a thin and beautifully spoken little thing”, who convinced him to give acting a go.
After his drama course he was accepted by the Rose Bruford school in Kent, which he picked because he liked the look of the lake and the swans. It was “absolute happiness”. He stayed three years, ironing out his Potteries vowels (he “blushed furiously” when he first heard it on a tape recorder) only to later see the emergence of kitchen-sink dramas and other actors polishing up their best nasal Midlands accents.
His rise from there wasn’t meteoric. He worked in repertory theatre before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), but did little more than carrying spears. He was given a lead part in John Whiting’s The Devils, but lost it after a screaming match with the director. He turned down another role because the script was “nonsense”.
However, he made his film debut in one of the RSC’s most celebrated productions, the Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook, and after a string of small television roles, including Corporal-Major Ludovic in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, finally came to prominence at the age of 41 playing Claudius in the 1968 Granada series The Caesars. His performance, with tic, stutter and limp — he put a pebble in his shoe — drew favourable comparisons with Charles Laughton’s in the unfinished cinema epic I, Claudius, and won Jones the best actor award at the Monte Carlo television festival.
More success in film followed, and in 1981 he made his first visit to Hollywood to work with Clint Eastwood on the Cold War drama Firefox (“I wasn’t nervous, I was bloody terrified,” he said). He became a favourite of the idiosyncratic director David Lynch and was cast as the cruel, freak show proprietor in The Elephant Man (1980). He went on to appear in the Lynch films Dune (1984) and Wild at Heart (1990).
Federico Fellini was the next crazed director to fall under his spell. Jones won the role of Orlando, the drunken narrator in And the Ship Sails On (1983), after Fellini took one look at his face and dissolved in ecstasies. “I felt I needed faces that could easily resemble those belonging to people who no longer existed and have vanished in the course of time,” Fellini later explained.
The two immediately hit it off — “he was like the brother I always wanted,” Jones said. “When we came to the last shot of the film I was so sad that I burst into tears.” However, working with Fellini was not straightforward. “He’s so inventive that he doesn’t give you much room to experiment. The unforgivable sin of any director is to suggest inflections and stresses. Fellini acts the bloody thing out in front of you beforehand,” Jones said. On top of that the sound was added later and Jones had to create his performance, line by line, in the dubbing theatre.
Jones married the actress Jennie Heslewood in 1965. He had fallen in love at first sight when he went to watch her in the final rehearsal of The Reluctant Debutante and saw her playing “this strange, eccentric creature”. Their three sons, Toby, Rupert and Casper, followed them into the profession. The eldest, Toby, made a successful acting career in Hollywood, starring in films such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).
Over the years Jones specialised in television period drama, for which fate seemed to have created his rich, treacly voice and face, easily covered in whiskers. He was in Nicholas Nickleby (1977), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), Silas Marner (1985), Adam Bede (1992) and David Copperfield (2000).
In 2005 Jones joined the cast of the ITV soap Emmerdale, playing Sandy Thomas, who made his first appearance on the wedding day of his character’s son, Ashley. Jones left the show in 2008, but returned a year later and continued to play the role well into his mid-eighties.
Jones often returned to his home town of Longton. There, discovering that the down-to-earth locals were unimpressed with his flamboyant attire, he reverted quickly to a baseball cap. Nevertheless, they were proud of him — they erected a plaque in his name in Longton Town Hall and asked him to open the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme. “My life now so very different to that of my early adulthood,” he once reflected, “but when I go back to Stoke now I’m accepted completely as I am, speaking the way I do.”
Freddie Jones, actor, was born on September 12, 1927. He died on July 9, 2019, aged 91
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Post by future100 on Jul 12, 2019 10:15:23 GMT
Yes, he was on Port Vale's books as a youngster, hard as nails, sadly died about 3/4 years ago. When I was a student, I worked a couple of summer breaks in the packing house at Diamond Clay with Fred and his brother Buster. Hard as nails is putting it mildly - he could also come to work clean shaven and have a full beard by home time! I look back on that time as a true character builder 😎 Fred's dad was a miner and part time bare knuckle fighter, years ago I kept a pub in Audley and Fred used to come in early doors, one Newcastle carnival day he was sitting at the bar when a group of five lads came in, as I was serving someone else one of the lads kept shouting over "come on barman how much F***ing longer have I got to wait" and a few other things. When I did serve them they picked up their pints and sat down, the mouthy git then went to the toilet, Fred also went to the toilet, only Fred came back, his mates went to look for him and found him lying face down in the urinal, they helped him back in the pub and said to him point out who's done it well sort him, he pointed to Fred, he stood up and they all sat down finished their pints and left. |
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